Tuesday, October 18, 2016

The new Princeton Review survey is out for 2017, rating virtually everything about colleges, from dorms to libraries to social life to professors to political complexion of the student body to campus radio stations, newspapers and theater.
Included are student attitudes toward LGBTQs. The rating is predicated on how strongly students agreed or disagreed with the following question: Students treat all persons equally, regardless of their sexual orientation and gender identity/expression.

Sunday, October 16, 2016

Don't tell the agriculturally ignorant writers at SNL, but it's nearly three times as likely that Diego would have been calling his mom from a wheat field in North Dakota than from a corn field, and likelier still that he would have phoned from a man camp near a field where oil is raised.
Still, last week's vignette was whimsical, touching, funny and a refreshing Screw You to demagogues like Donald Trump. We liked it a lot. (Especially Diego's description of his best bud's "baby blue eyes.")

Politico documented Fischer's about face on calling on Trump to drop out of the race (last Saturday after Pussygate broke) then reversing herself after Trump's second debate with Hillary, in which he did not self-destruct (or prevail).

“There’s players in our locker room with sisters, wives, and daughters. There’s not that type of talk in anyone’s locker room,” Los Angeles Clippers head coach Doc Rivers said. “I’ll have my son in here. CP has his son in here. Guys have their kids in here. This is probably more of a family environment than any locker room,” Clippers’ Blake Griffin said. “There’s no excuse to talk that way about women, to women, to other people,” Detroit Lions wide receiver Golden Tate said. “To say that locker room culture is somehow this defense for what Trump is saying is really denigrating all professional athletes,” former Minnesota Vikings player Chris Kluwe said. Kluwe was with the Vikings for eight seasons. He said that some locker room talk could be seen as disrespectful, but that it never reached the level of Trump’s comments.

Monday, October 10, 2016

Trump tried to drag Buffett and Soros into his freeloading pit of carry-forward tax avoidance, but Buffett was having none of it and released a statement eviscerating Trump's hip-shooting lie. The statement is below the video, below:

Just because it's New York: New York City (fun, diverse, and of course it's well executed)

AKSARBENT's personal favorite: San Francisco (mostly because of the adorable, fiercely talented short guy. Ouch!)

In an age in which a shitty K-pop video can rack up a billion YouTube views, the fact that none of the above videos has cracked 500,000 is truly a scandal.
Omaha, which is as big as Lyon, France, doesn't have an I Charleston video because apparently no one in this city realizes the promotional value of dance memes on the Internet.

The CDC has released this HIV prevention video, targeted at gay men. It will enrage Tea Partiers, but doubtless it cost way less than the $400,000 the Air Force spends on each F-35 helmet, so it's probably a good deal, considering the lifetime costs of HIV treatment.

You may not like the above, but government entity-produced dance videos can be much, much worse.

Friday, October 7, 2016

Artist's impression of the Earth scorched by our Sun as it enters
its Red Giant Branch phase in 5-7 billion years. The oceans will boil
before then, as the sun's luminosity increases 10% every billion or so years.Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Fsgreg

So you're in a self-driving car on a busy two-lane highway, and an oncoming car swerves into your lane.
The car knows from your credit card (and cross-linked databases) that you are 70. An average 70-year-old male has eight years of life left.
Will the car swerve right, into the back of a parked semi, avoiding a head-on with the errant vehicle and oncoming cars but decapitating you, or will it save your life by swerving into the path of a kid on the sidewalk next to the truck, a kid who has 70 years left?
MIT is collecting crowdsourced moral decisions about what self-driving cars should do when the worst happens.

Tuesday, October 4, 2016

Small businesses are mad as hell over theway major credit card firms are implementing their tardy switch to European-style chipped credit cards to finally reduce fraud in the U.S. The transaction-clearing machines are expensive, don't eliminate fraud, and small merchants are now responsible for charges made on old-fashioned cards — charges banks used to eat. From CNN:

The grocery store owners point to something Visa CEO Charlie Scharf
told analysts in 2014: that Visa met "in a room" with fellow credit card
companies, trade groups, banks and select retailers to come up with a
plan. That astounded U.S. District Judge William Alsup, a former antitrust prosecutor, at a court hearing in September.
"It's remarkable ... you don't get many antitrust cases where the CEO
admitted they were 'in a room,'" he said, according to a court
transcript. "I did antitrust cases as a lawyer. I never saw anything
this good." On Friday, the judge issued an order allowing the
case to move forward. He said the case "raises a plausible and
reasonable suggestion of collusion" by the credit card industry, which
operated "in lockstep." According to the grocery store owners,
the industry eliminated free market competition by banding together to
impose uniform penalties. If they hadn't, any single credit card company
could have offered better terms.

Monday, October 3, 2016

Why, it's Kansas, says the Daily Dot, which is not short for Dorothy, played by gay icon Judy Garland, whose father... oh, never mind.

The Daily Dot relied on stats from PornHub, the huge Internet erotic portal.
And what do gay porn viewers in each state look for? Below are the categories each state viewed more than those in other states:

Maynard (Bob "Gilligan's Island" Denver) slyly flashes a nipple to the CBS eye while trying to talk his best buddy Dobie Gillis (Dwayne Hick­man) into taking off all his clothes. Whoever said 1950s television was a vast waste­land obviously didn't know where to look.